


A study in human decay

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Dom/sub Undertones, Love, M/M, Mirrors, Transmutation, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22368334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Tom isn't as human as he used to be.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	A study in human decay

Harry watched the mirror’s surface. It gleamed back at him, smooth and shiny, showing his reflection in perfect detail. He was standing in the sitting room, right in the centre, watching the normality of his likeness – the basic humanity within his physicality. As he watched, admiring each part and examining each curious detail, he couldn’t help but touch.

Running his hands over each other, never taking his eyes off of the reflection, but simply feeling the natural elegance of his fingers; their shape, their length, their roughness at the joints. He let the fingers of the right skim down the fingers of the left, learning how they attached to his palm, which itself was creased, and lined, and _normal_. 

Without really thinking, Harry followed the lines, tracing the slope of his shoulders and the curve of his neck; even the form of his chin and the soft edge of his jaw. Despite the rudimentariness of the exploration, Harry could still feel his own transience; from the fragility of his skin, which took so little effort to break apart and make bleed, to the squishiness of his insides, including the wetness of his own tongue and the softness of his mouth.

There was no denying he was human; imperfectly, ephemerally, human. 

Unlike someone. 

The someone who caught Harry’s eye as he was brushing a hand gently through his hair. Tom was there. Standing, or rather leaning, the curve of his back both enviable in its elegance and unnatural in its exact positioning, against the wall. His arrival had been as silent as the fluttering of a moth’s wing, though he’d hate the comparison of himself to a creature whose life was so fleeting. 

Harry stopped moving and instead watched Tom. Watched how he stood inhumanly still, not moving, not blinking, barely even breathing; just studying him like an apex predator might study its prey just prior to pouncing. Harry swallowed. It was unnerving to be watched so closely, to have everything that he was so carefully and intimately scrutinised, but so too was it unnerving to have Tom watch him like _that_. 

But these days, so much of his behaviour could be categorised as unnerving at best. 

Non-human at worst. 

It had used to just be the small things, the simple little things that Harry could overlook if he wanted; he could disregard them as flukes, or laugh at the coincidence of Tom answering questions before they were asked, or knowing secrets that he shouldn’t, or describing colours that didn’t exist on any anthropological spectrum, but now, it was more than that.

Harry swallowed again and inclined his head as many degrees as was needed to see Tom clearly in the reflection. To see the stretch of his limbs, and the arching of his neck, even the curve of his fingers as they rested against his thigh.

Calculated normalcy. 

There was no denying that Tom still looked painfully attractive. The set of his features predetermined to be striking by mathematical precision, and the aspect all brought together by innate artfulness; the parting of his lips and the curl of his hair all curated for maximum effect. And it worked, Harry always had to catch his breath when he caught sight of Tom, but that didn’t stop there being something intrinsically…

_Wrong_ about the way he looked. 

Sometimes it was subtle, the way his nails were longer than natural and glassy, and how they cut Harry’s skin easily and repeatedly, or the way his bones pressed against his skin too tightly and the sharp outlines of every edge became visible. So too were there days where the light, no matter how dim, seemed to shine right through his skin, illuminating every blood vessel as though he were simply a piece of complex embroidery without its edges neatened.

From his spot, across the room, Tom smiled. 

It looked normal enough.

But only from this distance. Closer, it would be ripped red raw at the corners and frayed along every edge, and inside Tom’s mouth, there would be a sticky sweet rot that pervaded to the very centre of his tongue, similar to the rotting sickness infected the rest of him. 

Though, Tom’s disease was not of nature, but rather an, undeniably human, hubris; the conceited desire to live forever and become _more_ than fate could have ever conceived possible. Harry was not a religious person, but if he was, he would have agreed that the pursuit of corporeal perpetuity was a perversion of nature itself. 

That judgement would not stop Tom though, because one man’s perversion is another man’s transmutation, and that was the ultimate ambition.

To become something _more_ than human.

He would probably call it ascendency to the realm above and the becoming of something far greater than a mere human could understand, but Harry was inclined to disagree. When meddling with the fabric of human nature, there would be no ascension to the heavens, merely a descension down to hell. 

As if he heard that thought and disapproved, Tom slid himself off the wall with a certain serpentine grace and walked toward him, his figure getting larger in the reflection as he came closer. At least today, his movements were comparably normal.

The way he moved could be… strange sometimes; often too fast like a mere flicker from one spot to the next, or too slow, rather like he couldn’t remember how normal people moved. On top of that, the sounds he made became more subjective, usually, they were normal, but there were times when he didn’t make a sound, even when his entire weight pressed on a single loose floorboard. 

That silence was _always_ unsettling. 

It made the base of Harry’s stomach go cold and some heavy apprehension settle there. 

Tom was behind him now. He could feel the presence of his body; the mere physicality of him that made the hairs of the back Harry’s neck prickle, and his hands itch until he rubbed them on his jeans. There was something about Tom that was overwhelming like a wave crashing down on you, crushing you again and again until your breath was shallow, and your last thought was of the water choking your lungs. 

Harry wet his lips. 

Although right now, Tom’s face was normal, even, and human, there were times when his smile was spread too wide and his fingers felt too long as they hooked over Harry’s shoulder, folding themselves into the hollows of his bones. Harry tried to ignore those times. 

Ever so gently, Tom’s hand came to rest on his shoulder like it had done so many times before; firm and heavy, the weight of everything he was and everything that Harry accepted him being, stitched into the single moment

The silence continued, Tom’s eyes flickering over everything, and Harry’s simply holding his own gaze. He had to wonder how long it would be before hubris and arrogance erased any meaning behind the pursuit and with it any love that Harry still had. He shifted, moving his weight from one foot to the other. Tom continued to be still.

Right until the moment that he wasn’t. 

And, without quite knowing how Harry’s back was up against the mirror and Tom’s hand was gripping at his chin, the tips of his nail pressing into his skin harder than they should. He was watching him intently, so _intently_ that Harry could hardly bear to breathe, lest he interrupt the moment. When they were this close, the unpleasant things under his skin that Tom was so good at hiding started to spill out and make a mess. 

They were infused into the dark glossiness of Tom’s eyes, as heavy as the wet earth that caked the ground after rain, a thick mire that no one could ever escape from. Then there were the flickers of something even worse, it gathered at the pupil and bled out in twirls of burgundy threads, spinning spiderwebs into Tom’s eyes. It wasn’t natural, and it _certainly_ wasn’t human, but it _was_ hypnotising. 

Morbidly magnetic. 

And Harry couldn’t stop himself from watching, staring at Tom’s eyes as a starving man might stare at the gift of manna.

But there were too, other places where the monsters that lay beneath Tom’s skin made themselves known. They lay behind the curve of his mouth, pulling at his smile, and in the tips of his fingers, gripping harder than they should be able to, and leaving behind white fingerprints in their wake. There was no denying that soon, Harry would have to admit the person he had been so enraptured with simply didn’t exist anymore and that all that was left behind of him was a smile pulled out at the corners, and shadowy hand smoothing its fingers down his throat. 

But it hadn’t happened yet.

There was still some humanity – weakness – as Tom called it, flowing through his veins. Harry could hear it in Tom’s voice, the smoothness and the sweetness, so syrupy that he could taste the burn on the back of his throat, threaded through every letter. He could also feel it in the warmth of Tom’s fingers, and the outright heat of his palm, as he slid his hands everywhere they shouldn’t go and smiled like a schoolboy as he did it; a single human pastime that he still enjoyed.

There was still enough human in him that Harry could love him as deeply and as authentically as he wanted to, without ever having to second guess the morality of loving what could only be described as a monster.

Tom interrupted his thoughts though with his spare hand sliding down to rest on his waist. “Are you afraid of me?” he murmured, quite unprompted. The question made Harry’s skin prickle again, and a spike of nervousness rise up in his stomach, and that just made Tom’s eyes brighter, burning even, like there was a collapsing universe inside his irises. It was the most beautiful thing that Harry had ever see – just swirling colours and mutating shapes and sharp flashes of colour like there were fairy lights strung through Tom’s eyes.

He was gripping harder now and pushing Harry back against the mirror. The coldness of the surface practically a relief against the heat of Tom’s palms and the suffocating warmth of his body pressing closer than it should. “Are you afraid, Harry?” he repeated, the hand on Harry’s waist curving tighter, anticipating the answer, though his tone was so heavy that its gravity was going to pull Harry down with it to whatever circle of hell Tom’s morality resided, regardless of his answer.

“No,” he said.

Although subtle, the subconscious relief flooding through Tom’s veins was utterly palpable from the way he relaxed. Practically breathing a sigh of relief, though not at the maintenance of his humanity, but rather at the continuation of Harry's affections regardless. But the answer was still an honest one, though, for how much longer, Harry was unwilling to speculate. For now, all that mattered was the human feel of Tom’s hands, one still holding him still, and the other creeping up under his jumper, and the human softness of his edges, and the human euphony in his tone; those natural intonations that made his voice so easy and utterly entrancing.

“Good,” Tom said softly, dropping his hand from Harry's chin, and instead, sliding it up the back of his neck and into his hair. “You have no reason to be afraid of me,” he continued, mouthing the words along Harry's throat. It was a simple moment, and Harry found himself dropping his head back against the mirror and closing his eyes, and trying to forget that Tom was just someone who _used_ to be human.


End file.
